Law Librarian Blog

CBO Analysis of President's 2008 Budget

Check out the CBO's Preliminary Analysis of the President's Budget Request for 2008. [JH]

New Doubts On Nuclear Efforts by North Korea

Interesting story from the Washington Post: "The Bush administration is backing away from its long-held assertions that North Korea has an active clandestine program to enrich uranium, leading some experts to believe that the original U.S. intelligence that started the crisis over Pyongyang's nuclear ambitions may have been flawed."  [RJ]

Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States

New from GPO: George W. Bush Public Papers - 2003 Book I "Each Public Papers volume contains the papers and speeches of the President of the United States that were issued by the Office of the Press Secretary during the specified time period."  [RJ]

Participants Needed for AALL Mentor Project

Matching newer law librarians with more experienced members of the profession is a major goal of the Mentoring Committee. But the Committee needs your help. Now is the time to apply to be a mentor or a mentee. The application deadline is May 13, to allow matching to be done in time for the Annual Meeting. On the Mentor Project site you’ll find more information and separate application forms for mentors and mentees.

Rate Judges Online

Two sites to rate judges online:

1. "The Robing Room is a site by lawyers for lawyers.  Our mission is to provide a forum for evaluating federal district court judges and magistrate-judges."  [RJ]
2. "Courthouse Forum provides a unique and comprehensive platform for the open and candid evaluation and discussion of cases, courts, the judiciary, and legal issues." [JH]

Indiana Death Penalty Assessment Report from the ABA Section of Individual Rights and Responsibilities

From the press release: "After a thorough review of its state's death penalty system, an Indiana assessment team today released its final report and said the state needs to temporarily halt executions until it improves its administration of death penalty cases.

The full report and executive summary, including charts that identify specific recommendations and state compliance levels, are available on the ABA’s Web site at http://www.abavideonews.org/ABA340. "  [RJ]

Education Dept. May Issue Regs to Collect New IHE Statistics

From the Chronicle: "The Education Department is seeking through regulation to collect new summary data in the regular reports that colleges make to a massive database of educational statistics." (for subscribers)

See also:  Notice of Proposed Information Collection Requests, from the Federal Register. [RJ]

Movie and Television Show Download Sites

Movies and TV shows are increasingly available through peer-to-peer distribution networks:

• BitTorrent
• Peer Impact
• Veoh Networks
• Joost, available for approved beta testers

Source: Mercury News. [JH]

Trade Regulation Blog

From the blog: "Trade Regulation Talk is intended to serve as a forum for discussion of antitrust and trade regulation law in its various forms and related fields. As Executive Editorial Director of the CCH Trade Regulation Group, John W. Arden is in a unique position to follow current developments and trends in this legal area. Besides having access to the resources of a major publishing company, he has a staff of legal professionals whose jobs are to track and report news and developments in trade regulation law. This blog is the vehicle for Arden and his staff to highlight news and events and to comment in an informal way. Since the blog is intended to interact with trade regulation practitioners, students, and scholars, outside contributions are always welcome through postings or e-mail to the editor." [RJ]

White House Launches Redesigned Website

Check it out. [JH]

AALL's Alan Holoch Memorial Grant Available for New Orleans

The Alan Holoch Memorial Grant is available to help SR-SIS members defray the cost of travel or registration for the AALL Annual Meeting in New Orleans.  Individuals chosen to receive the grant have the potential to make significant contributions to law librarianship through their involvement with AALL and the Social Responsibilities Special Interest Section's Standing Committee on Lesbian and Gay Issues.

For more information, please see the application on the SR-SIS website:
http://www.aallnet.org/sis/srsis/lgbt/index.html

Seto's Understanding the U.S. News Law School Rankings Updated

Seto's Understanding the U.S. News Law School Rankings has been updated. Here's the abstract:

"This Article explores in detail the U.S. News & World Report law school rankings. Its descriptions, analyses, and conclusions are based primarily on U.S. News’ published descriptions of its 2006 computations, telephone conversations with U.S. News’ staff clarifying those descriptions, and a spreadsheet I have written that approximately replicates those computations. The Article’s goals are relatively modest: to help prospective students, employers, and other law school stakeholders read the U.S. News rankings more critically and to help law school administrators get a better handle on how to manage their schools’ rankings. In addition, the Article suggests ways in which U.S. News methodology might be improved. It does not, however, purport to offer a systematic critique of either the U.S. News rankings or ranking in general."  [RJ]

Law School Enrollment Edges Upward, Minorities Show Slight Gain, Women Slight Drop

From the press release: Enrollment at American Bar Association-approved law schools edged up slightly in the current academic year, with minorities gaining some ground as a proportion of the total, and the proportion of women dropping slightly.  None of the changes was substantial.

The ABA Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar today released statistics on students enrolled in ABA-approved law schools across the country, based on information compiled in a questionnaire distributed last fall."  [RJ]

U.N. Court Issues Ruling on Bosnia Genocide

From the N.Y. Times: "The International Court of Justice ruled that Serbia had failed to prevent the 1995 massacre at Srebrenica during the Bosnian war, but cleared the country of direct intent to commit genocide."

See also, Application of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, Judgment from the ICJ.  [RJ]

YouTube Anti-Piracy Software Policy Draws Fire

From InformationWeek: "The media industry is clashing with YouTube over its proposal to offer anti-piracy tools only to companies that have distribution deals with the top online video-sharing service, media insiders said.

YouTube, owned by Google Inc., plans to introduce technology to help media companies identify pirated videos uploaded by users. But the tools are currently being offered as part of broader negotiations on licensing deals, they said."  [RJ]

CRS Report Reviews Court Rulings on Image Search Engines' Reproduction and Public Display Rights

INTERNET SEARCH ENGINES: COPYRIGHT'S "FAIR USE" IN REPRODUCTION AND PUBLIC DISPLAY RIGHTS   
CRS Publication Date:  01/09/2007
Document No.:  RL33810
Author(s):  Robin Jeweler, American Law Division

Abstract:  In 2003, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals decided Kelly v. Arriba Soft Corp., which held that a search engine's online display of protected "thumbnail" images was a fair use of copyright protected work. More recently, U.S. district courts have considered an Internet search engine's caching, linking, and the display of thumbnails in a context other than that approved in Kelly. In Field v. Google, a U.S. district court found that Google's system of displaying cached images did not infringe the content owner's copyright. And in Perfect 10 v. Google, another U.S. district court held that the search engine's practice of in-line linking and framing was not infringing, but that its use of thumbnail images was. They are discussed in this report.

CRS Reports can be obtained from www.GalleryWatch.com. Individual reports are available from www.pennyhill.com. [RJ]

Opening: Access Services Librarian, Santa Clara Law Library

The Santa Clara University School of Law Heafey Law Library has an opening for the position of Access Services Librarian.  The successful candidate will be service oriented and have experience with both traditional and electronic legal materials; knowledge of automated circulation systems, windows based computers, operating systems, and applications in a Novell networked environment.  This position requires participation in the University's commitment to service and will involve some weekend and evening hours.

Reporting to the Director of Public Services, the Access Services Librarian is responsible for overall management of the Circulation Department including supervision of both exempt and non-exempt staff, and student assistants. The Access Services Librarian performs administrative duties requiring a comprehensive knowledge of library operations, policies and procedures and emphasizes the responsibility of each employee to deliver accurate, timely, and courteous service that respects individual needs and strengthens the educational experience.  In addition the Access Services Librarian will participate in providing reference services, rotate weekend reference shifts, and participate with the other law librarians in collection development. 

Required:

• M.L.S. from ALA accredited library school;
• J.D. from ABA accredited law school;
• 1-3 years professional experience;
• Excellent communications skills and supervisory experience;
• Ability to work effectively both independently and as part of a team   

Desirable:

• Knowledge of Innovative Interfaces system;
• Knowledge of internet and computers;
• Experience in training in computer based technology;
• Knowledge of web-based reference sources.

SALARY & RANK: Competitive and commensurate with experience and qualifications.  Support for continuing professional education will be provided.

AVAILABILITY:  Immediately.  Applications accepted until position is filled.

To apply, send resume, cover letter, and names, addresses and phone numbers for 3 references to:

Nancy Diaz
Administrative Associate
Heafey Law Library
Santa Clara University
500 El Camino Real
Santa Clara, CA 95053-0430

Santa Clara University, a private Jesuit Institution, is an equal opportunity/affirmative action employer, committed to Excellence through Diversity, and, in this spirit, welcomes applications from all persons including women, persons or color, and members of other under-represented groups.

Institutional Repositories Offer New Avenues for Publishing Student Scholarship

Modern law students must write scholarly articles to fulfill upper level writing requirements or write theses and dissertations to receive graduate law degrees.  Except for the few students who succeed in publishing a law review note, however, most law students will have limited opportunities to publish their work.  An exciting development emerging from the application of open access principles to legal scholarship is the use of institutional repositories to publish student scholarship.  Access to this work has previously been scanty because it was rarely published, and even more rarely indexed. Print collections, where they exist, are created by binding and cataloging the material for local collections.  The exception are law theses and dissertations from major programs which have been filmed and indexed by William S Hein & Co., Inc., to be sold as a microfiche collection; however, production costs are steep, and so is the price. Consequently, this collection is not widely held by U.S. law libraries.  Instead, if law schools created digital collections of these works by loading them into institutional repositories, the papers would be indexed by Internet search engines and would be freely available to the world at large. 

The students’ scholarship would attain visibility on a scale never before seen, and the students would enjoy the benefit of informing the subsequent work of others. Plagiarism should not be an issue because most institutional repositories are indexed at the full-text level, meaning that a simple Google search would quickly identify an existing paper that was later used without proper attribution.  Moreover, providing open access to student works in institutional repositories does not preclude their later publication.  In any case, because many of these student works are rarely published elsewhere, there is no existing publication structure to be threatened by open access publishing of them. 

Digital collections of student work can also be used for publicity and outreach, especially with alumni. Many schools already inform alumni of  recent faculty publications; alumni could also be informed of student scholarship published in repositories.  Making student scholarship available in digital collections provides students with a connection to their schools after graduation.

Law schools would also be sending the message that they take student scholarship seriously. Knowing that their work will also be subject to scrutiny beyond the four walls of their professors’ offices would give law students added incentive to produce better scholarship.  Law schools are in a position to go so far as to mandate submission of theses, dissertations, and other student papers into institutional repositories as a condition of graduation. Doing so would make a statement in support of open access that is consistent with the culture and values of legal educators and with our tradition of public access to legal information.  Alternatively, law schools may choose to limit publication to top papers, works that have been endorsed by a faculty member, or works that otherwise have earned the imprimatur of the law school before placing them in an institutional repository.

Open access repositories of theses and dissertations in other disciplines have been in use for more than a decade.  Open access proponent, Peter Suber, has written extensively on open access to scholarship, including the use of institutional repositories for publishing student scholarship (for more information see, http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/07-02-06.htm#etds).  Currently, the Registry of Open Access Repositories (http://roar.eprints.org ) lists more than a dozen collections of student work; including the NELLCO Legal Scholarship Repository which is used by Vermont (http://lsr.nellco.org/vermontlaw/ldel/) and Cornell (http://lsr.nellco.org/cornell/lps/) law schools to publish LLM theses.

If you would like more information about the other potential uses of university IRs, feel free to contact me (cparker@law.unm.edu). 

[Derived from a work that is forthcoming in 37:2 New Mexico Law Review (Summer 2007)]

Carol A. Parker, Law Library Director & Assistant Professor of Law, University. of New Mexico School of Law

Feminist Legal Theory Research Guide

Pace University Law Librarian and Adjunct Professor Cynthia Pittson has updated her useful Feminist Legal Theory Research Guide. Hat tip to Feminist Law Professors blog. [JH]

Balkin on the Legal Blogosphere

From the Yale Law Report: "Professor Balkin recently sat down for a Q & A with the Yale Law Report to give his thoughts on the legal blogosphere and how it's changing the nature of legal discussion and legal education."  [RJ]